A blog about poetry, literature, and art, that occasionally engages other issues of importance and interest.

Monday, January 15, 2007

Today’s Character Is Not a Skeleton Out of Its Cabinet

I’m fascinated by late poems, in which the poet assays and assesses his or her life in poetry. In this poem by Wallace Stevens, one of his most intimate and poignant, the poet addresses himself as he leaves the room, clearly a metaphor for life. As he prepares for death, he puts his poetic effects in order. Accused so often of writing “cold,” “lifeless” poems, fearing that it might be true, that he has squandered or evaded life, the speaker (who here is clearly identifiable with the poet, referring specifically to particular poems of his) looks back over the body of his work and realizes that it has been alive, has been a life, a part of a major reality. His work has changed nothing, and yet everything has been changed. As Adorno writes, “in a state of redemption, everything will be just as it is and yet wholly different” (Aesthetic Theory).

As You Leave the Room

You speak. You say: Today’s character is notA skeleton out of its cabinet. Nor am I.

That poem about the pineapple, the oneAbout the mind as never satisfied,

The one about the credible hero, the oneAbout summer, are not what skeletons think about.

I wonder, have I lived a skeleton’s life,As a disbeliever in reality,

A countryman of all the bones in the world?Now, here, the snow I had forgotten becomes

Part of a major reality, part ofAn appreciation of a reality

And thus an elevation, as if I leftWith something I could touch, touch every way.

And yet nothing has been changed except what isUnreal, as if nothing had been changed at all.

About Me

Reginald Shepherd is the editor of The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (University of Iowa Press, 2004) and of Lyric Postmodernisms (Counterpath Press, 2008). He is the author of: Fata Morgana (2007), winner of the Silver Medal of the 2007 Florida Book Awards, Otherhood (2003), a finalist for the 2004 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, Wrong (1999), Angel, Interrupted (1996), and Some Are Drowning (1994), winner of the 1993 Associated Writing Programs’ Award in Poetry (all University of Pittsburgh Press). Shepherd's work has appeared in four editions of The Best American Poetry and two Pushcart Prize anthologies, as well as in such journals as American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The Yale Review. It has also been widely anthologized. He is also the author of Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry (Poets on Poetry Series, University of Michigan Press). Shepherd has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, the Florida Arts Council, and the Guggenheim Foundation, among other awards and honors.